Somehow, I hadn’t been back there since
that memorable night, but now all that is set right.

Ever since this city and its entertainment
world became a fixture in my life, I have heard the name of Gayle Tufts spoken
in every corner. An American comedienne and singer in Berlin. THE American
comedienne and singer in Berlin. Germany’s ‘Miss America’. Or ‘Madam America’.
But it has taken me until now to actually see her in performance.

Ms Tufts’ evening, Some Like It Heiss, is a classic, fun-filled mixture of stand-up comedy, fine
monologue material, and zippy songs. And the lady herself a statuesque,
twinkling dame who doesn’t look nearly old enough to be joking about the
menopause. She delivers her material in a rich, clear contralto: mixing German
with sprigs of American in such a way that even folk like myself, with a
limited acquaintance with the German language, can understand the humour. And
it is that genuine type of humour, based on real life and personal experience,
and not just a collection of joey-joeys. Friendly humour, likeable humour. The
best sort.

The musical part of the evening
(accompanist: the enjoyable Marian Lux) was just as successful as the comic and
just as personal. Great to hear original material, rather than ‘Don’t Rain on
my parade’ or ‘I’m still here’! And delivered with ringing panache. Great to
hear someone taking the mickey out of the oh-so-trendy Brecht/Eisler tradition.
Great full stop. Has anybody yet cast this lady as anything from Dolly and Mame
to Mrs Peachum?

So, a grand return, for me, to the Bar
Jeder Vernunft, and a grand introduction to ‘Madam’ Gayle Tufts and her
thoroughly ‘hot’ show. Those who like it ‘heiss’ will love this! I did.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Today, to the Staatsoper. To see a ‘partly-opera’, by name Aschemond. Aschemond? A mixture perhaps
of Aschenbrödl and Frau Luna. Oh no. Much more of a mixture
than that. Shakespeare and Purcell stirred in (advertisedly) with a non-book
and 21st century music by Helmut Oehring. Sounded like a dangerously 1980s
University student cocktail. And what is this? … mixed in also with Sylvia
Plath! Mon dieu! The trendy idol of the 1980s University crowd. How old fashioned!
Oh dear. It seemed I was in for a horridly pretentious afternoon.

Well, it didn’t turn out quite like that at all.

When a piece cannily advertises in its programme that it has
a non-book, you can’t criticise it for that. In fact, it sort of did have an
outline: a series of glimpses back in time by a young man theorising on his
crazy, sexually immature, repulsively self-centred mother’s alcoholic suicide.
Ms Plath, I imagine.

However, someone wanted to use Purcell’s songs, and Herr
Oehring obviously had his settings of Shakespeare’s sonnets in his bottom
drawer, so the whole lot was turned into German text by Stefanie Wördemann, and
voilà; the non-book. The partly-opera.

With fairies in the kitchen. I’m not sure why. But they were
nice fairies and looked and sounded grand ..

Aschemond
certainly didn’t claim to have a non-score. In fact, it has a grand one. The
mixture of Purcell’s music and Oehring’s modern tones worked magnificently. I
waited expectantly to feel uncomfortable, but I didn’t. Which was a miracle, in
two and a half hours WITHOUT an interval. The only bit of new music I didn’t
like was the dirge setting of‘Shall I
compare thee to a summer’s day?’. By the time the singer got to the last
syllable of his (English) word, you had forgotten what the first syllable was.
And, sorry Mr Purcell, the musical highlight of the night for me was the
contralto showpiece in ‘Autumn’. By Oehring.

The staging, too, was a surprise. Looking at the photos
before the event it looked like a boring box set. Well, the box set turned
endlessly (perhaps too much) producing a seamless action, and in spite of the
‘non-story’ requiring the same scene to be repeated several times, only in the
last half hour (when people began walking out of the audience) did it, with its
deliberately slow pace, begin to drag. I see from the libretto that cuts have
been made. More are needed. And an interval. Otherwise the slow pace becomes
oppressive.

The cast sang their two kinds of music well: Tanja Ariane
Baumgartner (contralto) got the bon-bon of the new score, Bejun Mehta
(counter-tenor) the best of the Purcell. Marlis Petersen (soprano) as the
mother did well in both, but one was so irritated by her smackable character
that one just wanted the wretched woman off the stage.

A feature of the show was the written-to-order role of the
housekeeper, played in sign-language by the non-hearing actress Christina
Schönfeld, in a show-stealing but necessarily non-singing role, and the central
grown-up little boy, the narrator, was played beautifully by Ulrich Matthes, in
the crispest clearest actor’s voice I can remember in years.

I could go on giving ‘credits’ here for miles. They fill six
pages in the programme. Two orchestras, instrumental soloists, two conductors,
dance staff(although the dance element
was absolutely pasted in), designers of this and that, etc. But for a new
piece, I think the piece deserves the attention.

I hope they work on with Aschemond.
More trimmings? Perhaps a bit of an attempt to make the central woman less
Plath and more sympathetic, a new setting of ‘Shall I?’ and cut the totally unnecessary
choreography. And without doubt, put in an interval. Oh, and for the ordinary
audience’s sake: kill that claque in the back row.

And then I think – pick yourselves up off the ground, you
who know me -- I would like to see it again.

I who, in 67 years, have never seen an even partly-modern
part-opera a second time.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

What is it about
Verdi’s Attila? An opera which had a fairly
relative success in its time, which was described as frankly ‘feeble’ by the
critic of the London Times, which rendered
up one aria to the concert rooms, and perched thereafter on the edge of the
revivable repertoire for years …

And now, it’s stormingly
in fashion. I came from Vienna to Berlin this week. It’s playing in both
cities. At the Theater an der Wien in a staged version, and in Berlin in a
concert version. The concert version is pretty surely the more viable, because,
from the beginning, the libretto of Attila
was regarded as being somewhere from unsatisfactory to awful. Cardboard
characters in lego-plot action. The ‘Wildhorn trick’ existed in the 19th
century already: take a famous title and stick a bundle of the same old stuff
behind it.

Well, the difference here
is that Verdi’s ‘same old stuff’ isn’t all just stuff. His score throws up some
beautiful bonbons – from the ‘celebrated War Song’ to the act three trio – by
way of the pretty ‘dear daddy’ aria ‘Liberamente or piangi’ for the soprano,
the basso showpiece ‘Mentre gonfiarsi l’anima’ and even the rather reminiscent
but reasonably singable pasted-in megascena for baritone ‘Dagl’immortali
vertici’.

The war song is a
lively bit of vigorous show-off music worthy of a Rossini finale, and it’s a
joy to have a basso for the central character ... in fact, I couldn’t help
myself thinking, I wish Verdi had gone the whole hog and made the boring, tenorious
Foresto a contralto. You can’t blame Atilla’s ‘hit songs’ for its
semi-eclipse; and you can thank those showy solos, if not much else, for the
subsequent return to favour.

Tonight
I got my introduction to Attila, complete,
at the Philharmonie. And I understood just why it has had a chequered
life. The bits in between the pop songs – reminiscent choruses, vast duets, et
al -- are just too ‘standard Verdi’ to be truly acceptable. But the pop songs
are great fun.

Tonight, the audience
exploded twice. Rightly. In Odabella’s surefire War Song and in Attila’s big solo.
Both in Act I. Which meant that the second half, in spite of the Act III trio,
and the stabbing bit, was a bit of a fizzle.

I came to the theatre
tonight prepared to hear Erwin Schrott, my marvellous Leporello of last year,
sing Attila. He scratched.Damn damn
damn. And I could have seen Dmitri Belosselsy in Vienna! We got Roberto
Tagliavini instead. Well. If that’s an ‘understudy’. give me understudies! I
think ‘replacement’ would be a fairer word. This (very?) young man sang the
role simply beautifully, dominated the stage, and only a little lack of weight
in the lowest register stopped him from being wholly perfect. The house
applauded him wildly and I was on my feet, cheering him. Which I don’t do
often!

The other triumph was
the Odabella of Liudmyla Monastryrska. She pinged out the power-packed frills
of her War Song, made a gem of her daddy song, and it wasn’t her fault that her
role fades away into the conventional in part two. The opera as a whole does. A
really fine performance.

Massimo Giordano did
what he could with the pale, uninteresting Pollio-Manrico part of Foresto
without demeriting, and the even more boring part of Ezio was played by the
same Dalibor Jenis whom I found ‘non-existent’ in last year’s concert Trovatore. He was non-existent (and
occasionally imprecise pitchwise) again. The cellophane baritone.

The comprimario parts,
however, were excellently done. Ante Jerkuinca was a smashing Leone (watch for
him) and Jörg Schôrmer an incisive, plump Uldino. And because they were only
two, we didn’t have the usual anguishing parade of music-stands and scores and
folk traipsing on and off the stage! Hurrah!

The orchestra under
Pinchas Steinberg was impeccable, and the chorus only irritating because they
stood up and sat down distractingly, like oratorio extras, and sang music which
sounded like leftovers from Nabucco.

The concert format
works well for this piece. But what can you do with a show with two uninteresting,
too-conventional-to-be-true principal characters, and with its two blazingly best
numbers in Act I? Probably sing those two
numbers in concert. Which is what the Victorians did.

All I know is, I’d
cross town any time, even at the renewed risk of running into an American
president (a nice young soldier helped me round the barricades), to hear
Tagliavini sing anything at all, and to hear that War Song again. I hummed it
all the way home (‘Non piu me-he-he-he-sta…’).